Crisis in Ukraine.

• Author: Kiehl, William P.

Crisis in Ukraine

By Hannah Thoburn, DC-based Eurasian analyst, and Katrina V. Negouk, Center for the National Interest.

http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2014/01/19/yanukovych-is-courting-disaster-in-ukraine/

http://nationalinterest.org/print/commentary/understanding-ukraine's-choice-9624

Writing a predictive article on a rapidly evolving political crisis is very much like painting a moving railway train. One may get some color on the speeding locomotive but is unlikely to get anything like complete coverage. That is somewhat the situation this writer faces in commenting on just two of the many Internet articles that have appeared in recent weeks in response to the crisis in Ukraine following the Ukrainian Parliament's November 28, 2013 rejection of a trade relationship agreement with the European Union in favor of a closer bond with the Russian Federation. The two articles listed are among a very few presenting a more nuanced and thus accurate picture of the rapidly escalating crisis.

Of course, as we have seen, since that dramatic November 28 decision, many thousands of protestors have made their views known in favor of a closer relationship with the EU and the West in general. The resulting demonstrations, protests, confrontations, violent reactions by the government, and counter reactions by the Ukrainian people have precipitated a cascading political crisis that has the potential to draw Russia and the West into very real and potentially a very dangerous conflict for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Reviewing most of the articles written about the Ukrainian Crisis of 2013-14 in U.S. journals and media, one would be mislead into believing that the only cause of the conflict as well as its ultimate solution is one of human rights and individual liberty. There is a strong case to be made and a plausible backdrop for the human rights rationale. Yet what is so often overlooked is the powerful economic basis for the Ukrainian government's rejection of the EU agreement in the first...